THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Publishing; U.S. Houses Look Abroad At Long Last

By EDWIN McDOWELL

Published: November 14, 1988

ONE of the most striking features of American book publishing is how quickly it has come to be dominated by foreigners.

The principal reason, as Robert Maxwell noted recently, after winning his protracted battle for control of Macmillan Inc., is that anyone with global publishing ambitions has to have a solid foothold in the United States. Nevertheless, the swift transformation raises the question of why American publishers, while so quick to transform a cottage industry into an industry controlled by conglomerates in the past two decades, were so slow to respond to the global challenge. Why did they not buy the American houses that were eventually bought by foreigners? Why did they not forge a more aggressive international publishing strategy?

The weak dollar has greatly favored foreigners in the acquisitions game, of course. That is a major reason why Bertelsmann, the West German publisher, was able to outbid American suitors for Doubleday two years ago by agreeing to pay more than $475 million. And it is a major reason why Robert Maxwell, the British communications entrepreneur, recently outbid his rivals for Macmillan. In a recent interview, Mr. Maxwell said he could afford to pay almost $2.6 billion for Macmillan because he intends to have the publisher resume flexing its muscles in international publishing, and because it will become part of a communications empire that already spans a good part of the globe.

But a favorable exchange rate does not explain why American book publishers have lacked the global vision of Bertelsmann, of Maxwell and the Pearson group of Britain, and of Rupert Murdoch of Australia, all of which have been altering the American publishing landscape. In less than a decade, and indeed mostly in the past two or three years, they have acquired the following American houses, some of them more than a century old: Addison-Wesley, Atheneum, Delacorte, Dell, Doubleday, E. P. Dutton, Harper & Row, Macmillan, New American Library, Salem House, Charles Scribner's Sons and Viking. Bertelsmann also acquired the Literary Guild, one of the two major American book clubs, and a few years ago another West German company, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, bought Henry Holt.

Nor does that appear to be the end of it. Lord Weidenfeld, the British and American publisher, recently predicted additional purchases by big foreign publishers. ''You may not see the same European owners owning the same American companies five or seven years from now,'' he said, ''but in the aggregate there will be more of them.''

The reason for the European interest, Lord Weidenfeld noted, is that the United States is the center of English-language publishing, as well as the richest market in the world. And that is a big reason American book publishers were outflanked by foreigners; it was not thought necessary to scramble for foreign markets. By the time the American publishers realized there was big money to be made even in smaller foreign markets, the foreign companies already had a decided advantage, both because of the weak dollar and because they were well established in global marketing and distribution.

The so-called Benjamin Report, published five years ago in association with the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, sharply criticized American publishers, particularly publishers of books of general interest, for not looking much beyond their borders.

Now, of course, change is in the air, fueled by publishers' desire to acquire world rights to books and by their wish to coordinate a book's publishing schedule in various nations. Random House bought three prominent British publishing houses last year. Simon & Schuster is publishing books in Britain. And Little, Brown recently formed a sales and distribution subsidiary in London. Moreover, Baker & Taylor, a leading book distributor, is forecasting 20 percent growth in foreign sales during each of the next five years.

But Bantam, Harper & Row, Viking and now Macmillan remain far ahead, with subsidiaries in countries from Japan to India to Australia.

The seeds of these international publishing efforts are just beginning to bear fruit. Harper & Row and William Collins & Sons of Britain, which is a part owner of Harper, jointly bought the rights to Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ''Perestroika,'' which they then sold in about 15 non-Communist nations. And Collins bought from Harper & Row the British and Commonwealth rights to a novel being written about Christopher Columbus's discovery of America.